Home // eTELEMED 2019, The Eleventh International Conference on eHealth, Telemedicine, and Social Medicine // View article

Ambient Monitoring System for Urination

Authors:
Toshifumi Tsukiyama

Keywords: Urination, The elderly, Water flow sensor, Active RFID tag, Vibration sensor.

Abstract:
Urination is one of vital quotidian activities that is closely involved in maintaining the healthy life of the elderly. The number of times and the time of day that an elderly person urinates are important data to detect a latent, dangerous situation that may require medical treatment. In this paper, we propose a sensor system for monitoring urination at home. Since the bathroom of a house is shared by elderly persons and their family members, the monitoring system has to detect urination but also identify a person who uses the bathroom. Urination is usually accompanied by the use of tap water from a toilet's flush tank. Urination can be made recognizable by monitoring the flow of water in the toilet bowl. The monitoring system uses the water flow sensor that is attached to the toilet. Active Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags are used for identification of persons. The subject of the monitoring wears an active RFID tag when he/she uses the bathroom. The ID code of the tag is read by the tag reader contactlessly without any actions, when a person carrying a tag gets closer to the tag reader. Our system reports his/her records of urination to a local nursing center without explicit user interaction. The proposed sensor system is available at a reasonable cost and can be installed easily in any type of housing. No interaction by the user is required. The monitoring system has been installed in a volunteer's housing and some results from this experimental trial will be presented.

Pages: 135 to 138

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2019

Publication date: February 24, 2019

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4359

ISBN: 978-1-61208-688-0

Location: Athens, Greece

Dates: from February 24, 2019 to February 28, 2019